


Reylo Week 2018

by Merixcil



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Dream Sex, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Reylo Week 2018, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-27 00:14:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14413509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: A collection of fics written for Reylo week 2018, based on the official prompts





	1. Colour

Colour is everything not absorbed, everything pumped back out into the universe. Black absorbs everything, green just everything that isn’t green and white takes nothing. There is always an inverse to everything seen, something that sucks in everything else.

Rey starts out in the brown, the colour of the desert sands that never quite have the good graces to turn to rich orange on her side of Jakku. Brown is an easy training ground for her, it comes in such a wide variety of shades, from the deep earthy tones of what little leather she can scrape together to the pale, almost pretty brown of the cloth she makes her clothes from. Hiding in the desert are scraps of grey and silver, the relics of the Empire. She takes them and she gives them over to Unkar Plutt in exchange for food and water.

She dreams of green, and wakes up back in the monochrome dugout of her old AT-AT. The sun scorches the back of her neck and throws the shadows of the dunes into painfully sharp relief. She doesn’t want this, but this is what she gets.

Ben grows up being told that he can have any colour he chooses. The white of senator robes, the blue of the peacekeeping forces being put together by the new Republic, the gaudy neon of the circus entertainers that are so in vogue on Coruscant. He hates the choice, or he hates being expected to know as soon as they’re presented to him. When the time comes for his mother to send him off to his uncle, unsure of what else she’s supposed to do to fight the rising black within him, he’s happy to take on the brown mantle of a Jedi.

And for a while they are both brown. Her in the baking hot heat of a world that is almost the same colour as her. He on a planet build of living green ocean and grass, the vibrant blue of the first lightsabre he builds.

But there’s still black building at the back of his mind, in the stone cold centre of his heart. It sucks in everything else, slowly but surely. It doesn’t matter how many different colour lights you shine on to a black background, it swallows them all with frightening certainty.

Rey sleeps and dreams of a peaceful place, a green island set into a stormy grey ocean. Ben dreams of dazzling bright colours, of presents brought back from the edge of space by his father and of the rainbow coloured operas his mother would take him to when she had the time.

The stars were never the same for the two of them, never in line. Yet they would stare up at the deep inky blue, the not quite black, and each would imagine that someone was staring back at them.

When Ben wakes in the middle of the night to find the green light of his uncle’s lightsabre hovering over him, he decides he’s had enough of waiting for the dark to swallow him down. He doesn’t hesitate, he lets the black tongues of the fire that has always been burning, unattended in his chest flare up and wrap him in something more powerful than he could ever hope to be, more terrible. The power is astonishing, once every other colour has been ripped out of him he no longer has to give anything back. No longer a reflection of everything poured on to him, he drags people and power and planets and systems into his orbit. He swears himself to a master so much better at this than he and while this is not peace it’s so much better than eternal indecision. Darkness is absolution, the Force shall free him.

For Rey, the shedding of her exoskeleton is more subtle. She can barely breathe when she first sees Takodana she doesn’t know where to place all that green, reflecting back up at her. Every time she blinks she expects it to vanish, she can’t believe that it doesn’t fade from her eyes.

She can’t shake the phantom instinct that there is something wrong with this much green. So wonderful, so beautiful, and so not what she had expected of the Galaxy beyond Jakku. She dives into the comforting brown halls of the crypt below Maz’s castle and reaches for something bigger than herself, she reaches for power.

Rey reaches for something blue. And the hectic array of images that suggest themselves to her in its wake are full of it. She can feel it clawing at her throat, trying to get inside her. She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t know what to do with it.

She gets captures by a hulking dark thing that dresses in black and refuses to be a monster. The only part of its true nature that it dares reveal is the crackling red lightsabre, meant to bring death upon anyone who finds themselves on its opposing end.

In the old Jedi order, these colours meant something. Now, all Rey sees is the danger. Hours later, she is reunited with the blue, refusing to think about how history overwrote the previous owner in a tirade of blood. The muddle of blue and red in the forest creates a haze of purple that sticks in both their memories with frightening accuracy, relayed over and over until they can relive the night together in dreams.

Ben is no longer Ben. He hid the name away, let the black pluck it from his hands. He retreats back into the dark and keeps the deep purple bruises that mar his skin after the fight away from prying eyes.

When Rey goes to the island, the green and blue place that had looked so peaceful in dreams, she doesn’t change into the brown robes of a Jedi. It feels somewhat pointless under the circumstances. She listens to Luke’s manifesto on the hubris of the Jedi but she can hear the gentle plea beneath the words, a desperate hope that she will be a clean slate. Something bright and white and easy.

She disappoints him. His approval counts for nothing. The green of his lightsabre has long since been put away and he is left in the lurch, beyond where Rey can reach him. She turns tail and runs back towards the black, trying to pull her in, trying to absorb her from the Resistance and never give her back.

There is a room painted red, with shining dark floors and a throne in which a would-be emperor sits dressed in gold. Ben knows this room all too well, Rey doesn’t know the half of it. But red means blood and sooner or later all little girls have to grow up. The flash of blue when her lightsabre ignites is brilliant and out of place and the disturbance to the carefully crafted pallet of this place breaks the false sense of peace. This time when they fight they do it together, and there is no purple haze, just two points of blue and red light moving in and out of each other’s orbit, not thinking much further than the end of their next swipe.

When they’re done, Ben holds out his hand and asks her to join him. Once upon a time he had had all the choice in the world and in the end the choice had been made for him. Rey is just starting to see the full extent of all that she could be, the limitless range of hues her future holds. So she tells him no and tries to pretend she can’t feel his heart breaking.

Tries to pretend she can’t see his heart breaking, when the gangway of the Falcon is still down and she’s looking at him across a space that shouldn’t be surpassable. For a fleeting moment she can feel the potential for the pure white light that sits at the very edge of her heart, and she can see the blanket black that she would like to tarnish Ben with.

But the moment passes, leaving them each as shades of grey. Rey can’t stand to see so much of herself reflected back at her from someone so hateful, so she closes the gangway and waits for the heartbreak to pass.


	2. Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A girl from Jakku is brought to the Knights of Ren for training

They bring her to him far too late, she’s already been shaped by desert sands and a lifetime of making do. A scared, spitting, snarling animal. He knows immediately that he won’t be able to tame her.

“So this is the girl I’ve heard so much about.” Kylo Ren keeps his face stony as he looks down at the body that has been thrown at his feet. Weak, skinny. It will take the best part of a month just to get enough nutrients in her for her to withstand the training. But the Force swells and dances about her in well-defined patterns that look nothing like his own power. 

She spits on his shoes. He sneers at her. “What’s your name?”

She won’t talk, and when he probes her mind for answers she throws up enough of a wall against him that he decides to let her keep her secrecy for now. Her spirit will need to be broken, but only an idiot would put out a fire that wild when they could be using it for their own ends.

 

 

 

The Knights of Ren are supposed to train together, to rise together. In practice it doesn’t work like that, because the First Order needs Kylo Ren more than they need the others right now, but Kylo Ren returns to his soldiers after every audience with the Supreme Leader and smiles when he sees their progress.

The girl from Jakku is one of just three new recruits they have picked up since the Knights of Ren left Ahch-to, but she’s amongst the best of them. Kylo does his best not to speak to highly of her when he is brought before Snoke, trying to keep her out of the limelight. She is strong and she is brave but she can be spectacularly stupid in her impulsiveness. In his opinion, she’s not ready for active combat but he doubts the Supreme Leader would see it that way.

His soul feels shredded, his heart out of place in the wide open cavity of his chest. Kylo pulls his back up just as straight as he can manage and marches back into the training grounds and before he can blink, the girls is upon him.

She likes the other Knights so much better than he. Perhaps because they weren’t the one who sentenced her to be one of them, or perhaps because she feels safer with other women. Either way, no one knows her name.

“Watch out!” Moreenha Ren calls from the other side of the room as the stuttering orange of the girl’s training blade swings towards his face. Kylo ducks out of the way, rolls across the floor and grabs a training blade of his own. His real lightsabre is stuck to his hip and really, if he were trying to teach her a lesson about obedience he would use it to gift her a shiny new scar.

In the three years she’s been here, she’s never done anything she hasn’t wanted to, save for staying confined to her quarters. Kylo has felt the Force moving around her, debating a real escape attempt against the two failed efforts she made when she was first brought here.

 _I don’t like it here._ The Force whispers through her. _But I don’t have anywhere better to be._

Kylo raises his blade and brings it down against hers, revelling in the grind of one ‘sabre against the other. She parries and slips away from him, then rounds back with a shriek, putting all her strength into the two armed swing she aims at his legs.

They go on for the best part of the next hour, till they’re both grinning and sweaty and the others have stopped their practice to come and watch. “You’re not bad, scavenger.” Ben tells her.

“I’m not a scavenger.” She snaps, though she doesn’t stop smiling.

 

 

 

Kylo Ren wakes in the middle of the night, and feels the girl from Jakku moving through the Force around him. He can feel all the Knights of Ren, but not like this. Not like her. The Knights are beholden to the Dark Side but the girl keeps away from them as much as possible when they run through Force drills, and when she pulls up her power from the deep ocean of the Force that lies between them all, it doesn’t smell the same as the rest of them.

Cautiously, he reaches out to her through the Force. She is sleeping, she is quiet. She still won’t tell him her name. As soon as he touches the pieces of her he can reach, she reaches back towards him, curious and bright. She wraps herself around him and explores the parts of him he offers up.

He lies in the darkness, painfully awake and holding tight to his breath. She is never going to be calm, never going to be a soldier, never going to fit neatly into Snoke’s palm the way they were designed to.

 _The Force will free me._ Kylo assures her sleeping mind when she probes the nexus of his power and is puzzled by how much deeper and darker it is than her own.

 _Free yourself._ She replies. Then she lets him go and slips away of her own accord into the black.

 

 

 

“You have to let me look into your mind.” Kylo explains to her.

“I don’t have to let you do anything.” The girl replies. She’s working on the hilt of her lightsabre, rearranging the crystal she had spent so many days meditating over.

Kyber crystals are rare. They’re lucky to have them. The other Knights have blades in shades of red, magenta and deep bronze. But the girl from Jakku has a purple blade, standing out like a sore thumb when they ignite on the main floor of their training vessel. Kylo is desperately glad that no one from the First Order has come snooping around in a while, he doesn’t know what Snoke will do to her if he finds out she’s not following the code the same as the others.

 _You have to._ He pleads with her. _The Supreme Leader will know if I haven’t seen into your mind._

“Fuck the Supreme Leader.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not? I mean it.”

With a flick of his wrist, Kylo pins her against the wall. “I am your commanding officer.”

“You are a scared little boy in a high castle.” She spits. He remembers the way his boots had shone in the light reflecting off her saliva when she was first brought here.

She’s not a girl anymore, not really. She’s in her early twenties, wearing a self-styled tunic that wouldn’t be so out of place on her desert home world, picked out in black and grey and red. Her features are so soft, her heart so bright. For the first time he wonders if she might not belong here and immediately wishes that she would stay all the same.

He unpicks the first strands of her consciousness, as delicately as he is able. She struggles and flails physically but he’s so much bigger than her, her main advantage is that she’s fast.

Memories of endless sand dunes and unspeakable thirst pour out of her mind like so much sand. He pities her squalid upbringing and she feels that pity only to throw it back in his face. She writhes, her command of the Force catching up to her as she digs herself into Kylo’s heart and pushes him back.

She falls to the floor, he tries to step towards her but he can’t stand the blinding Light pouring off her.

“You’ll never be like me.” He says. Because it’s true and he thinks that if he lets himself say it she might find it in her to refute him.

She doesn’t. “I never said I wanted to be.”

Without a word, Kylo reaches out a hand to help him up. She takes it, and they both pretend that everything’s fine.

 

 

 

She looks so beautiful, standing in the open doorway leading to the upper deck of the _Finaliser._ It was a mistake to ever take her off the training ship. She’s wrapped in a long dark cloak that used to be Kylo’s, he’d been wondering what happened to it. It’s the middle of their sleep cycle and he’s been caught on his way to the bathroom, without a weapon handy, without anything but his pyjamas and the Force.

“Where are you going?” His voice is so painfully soft. He should be angry with her, he should be raging. He should throw her against the wall and keep hitting her over the head till she falls unconscious.

She bites her lip. “Away. Sorry.”

“You don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“I have anywhere else to go.”

The bulge of a packed bag sits underneath her cloak, he can just about see the clean silver of her lightsabre handle. She’s not wrong. With thrilling clarity, he realises he’s not going to stop her.

The light from the Star Destroyer beyond frames her in a perfect halo. Kylo reaches out through the Force just to feel the feather light brush of her against him all over again. He doesn’t bother trying to twist his way any deeper than she will let him, he learned that lesson a long time ago.

She will never be Dark, she will just adapt to her environment. She-

“Thanks. For everything.” She smiles a slight sad smile and ducks through the door. She looks so out of place on a First Order ship. Too well put together, she was built to fight.

“Bye, girl from Jakku.” _I’ll miss you._

“My name’s Rey.” She tells him, as the door slides closed, and the interior of his personal shuttle is plunged into dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think I did a great job working with the prompt for this one. I probably shouldn't have gone for something so wide scope when I only had forty five minutes to throw it together but oh well. I might explore the idea of Rey as a Knight of Ren properly in a longer fic sometime.


	3. Touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Distance is as nothing to them
> 
> This chapter is NSFW

Rey’s never really thought about sex before, she’s never had the time nor the patience. Maybe for a minute she let herself imagine that her and Finn might find some time to explore each other’s bodies on the way from one place to the next but she hadn’t cared enough to force the issue.

This though, sitting before the fire and looking into the eyes of a man thousands of lightyears away, feeling his hand, as real and corporeal as her own, reach out to touch hers, ignites something in her she wasn’t ready for. There’s compassion and understanding and the sweet relief that she has someone in this universe who she can be sure feels those same things for her, but they tangle in on themselves and come into sharp focus over the feel of his skin against her own. The clatter of her heart in her ears is deafening, the speed of his thoughts incomprehensible. The only thing she can be sure of is the mutual understanding hanging between the two of them.

_I feel it too._

 

 

 

Kylo Ren, Ben, whatever he calls himself, falls further than she would have thought possible. Rey lies awake on her bunk on the Falcon, wondering if Rose has talked Finn into all the afterhours exploration she never got round to and tries to forget what it felt like to have a hand pressed against her own over the fire.

 

 

 

There is a hand on hers and another between her legs. There are teeth digging into her neck and a quick tongue that follows after them, probing at the bite marks left in her skin. The weight of the body over hers is substantial but not insurmountable, the hard line of its erection brushing tantalisingly close to her crotch.

“I want-“ Rey stutters out.

“I know.” The figure over her breathes. It’s voice is familiar and alluring. “Stars above, I know.”

It slides into her, touching pieces of Rey’s body that have never been touched. Too deep inside her for her own fingers to reach and as yet unopened to anyone else. She gasps and arches up into the body as it groans and grinds up hard against her pubis. Their torsos pressed together, their legs entangled.

She’s never done this before.

Rey moves against it, feeling the compound pleasures of its arousal mixing with her own, so that sex that could take them all night takes a matter of minutes. She cries out when she comes, familiar with orgasm but not with this whole body, shaking, mystical thing that makes it impossible to think straight for a full minute as she comes down.

The body over hers keeps thrusting, grunting, jaw falling open in sweet surrender when it comes. She can feel it, deep inside her. It feels like the things left behind will never entirely work their way out of her, and in the moment she’s alright with that.

Rey looks up at the body, just starting to go soft inside her. She sees dark eyes, dark hair, a sad droop to the brow and a scar bisecting his right cheek. He’s smiling sadly, like he thinks the moment is going to end. “Rey.”

Kylo Ren wants to kiss her, she can feel it through the Force. Before Rey can make up her mind as to whether or not she wants to kiss him back she wakes up on the new rebel base on Dantooine, staring down the alarm set to drag her to her morning drills and painfully conscious of how wet she is.

 

 

 

The next time they meet face to face, he is angrier than Rey has ever seen him. The First Order is falling apart and he is the root cause. Like he tore apart his family without even trying, like he tore apart his soul.

“You’re nothing.” He spits and Rey no longer needs to listen to hear the _but not to me_ that follows the sentiment like clockwork.

“I know, Ben.”

“You’re nothing.”

“I know.”

His ‘sabre is still at his hip, undrawn and lifeless. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, his clothes torn from his mad dash through the forests of Marsteff and his cheeks painted with tear tracks. He’s wound so tight, looking like he might collapse any minute.

So much anger, and so much sorrow. Rey steps towards him, ever so carefully and holding out a hand, like she did around a fire more than a year ago now. He looks down at it and she can feel him pull towards her, like gravity.

He stumbles, he falls. Rey catches him when he’s still on his knees, wrapping an arm around his head and bringing him in close to sob into her stomach.

“I know.” She murmurs. “It’s ok.”


	4. Mythology

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes people die and it's all you can do to bring them back (Orpheus and Eurydice retelling)

The empty space she leaves behind her could level mountains. Ben wakes every morning to the sun streaming through the bedroom windows where he failed to close the curtains the night before and rises up, expecting to see the soft brown halo of her hair fanning out across the pillow. Every time he finds it missing, he assures himself that she’ll be downstairs, eating standing up at the breakfast bar despite the fact that they have stools or burying her nose in a book without bothering to turn the television off after the morning news. Light inserts itself into his life whether he likes it or not, but she was sound, she was fire.

He closes his eyes and he remembers her smile like the crescent moon on clear nights, opening out to cradle the stars.

His mother would want him to move on, Ben thinks, but his mother’s not around to browbeat him in to getting help and his father can’t stand awkwardly on the edge of his emotional fallout anymore. Sometimes he calls the house phone in the middle of the night, just to hear her voice on the other end of the line.

_Hi, you’ve reached Rey and Ben. We’re not here right now, so leave a message and we’ll call you back._

Ben must have left more than fifty messages by now, terrified that the storage space on their answering machine will run out any day. If he gives it enough time, she’ll call back. He’s sure of it. 

 

 

 

Ben drives himself out of town on a whim, wearing the same pair of pyjamas he’s been living in for a week and with an axe in the boot of his car. His vision goes curiously blurry every time he glances at the speedometer. He pushed past the speed limit ten miles ago, quantifying it won’t make any difference.

Hands gripping tight to the wheel, knuckles white with the strain. He swerves to avoid a car coming towards him in the opposite direction down a road that he knows should be big enough for the both of them and swears up a storm when they stay in their lane, easily out of his way if he were really paying attention to the road.

If Rey were here, she would snap at him, scream bloody murder till he got his shit together and calmed down. She would demand he pull over and swap places with her so that she could drive. Her anger was always so much less destructive than his.

But she’s not here. She’s not anywhere. Ben doesn’t stop driving till he’s well and truly lost, parking the car as well as he has the patience to on the edge of a forest and heading off into the trees with his axe. He wants to break something, something that matters. Maybe he can split his own head open and be done with it. He pushes on as the sun begins to set, swinging the axe wildly into the trunks of unsuspecting trees and disappointing himself every time when his anger refuses to abate.

Half an hour in from the road is an oak four times are wide as he is. It must have grown here for hundreds of years, the nobbled crevices of its trunk and the wide, spiderlike reach of its canopy reminding him of his mother’s old political friends. That will do, he thinks, or at least it will be a start.

The axe doesn’t want to work with him. It takes Ben hours to whittle the trunk down till it can fall, the crash of branches splintering and cracking as it impacts on the soft forest floor soothing his nerves. He doesn’t stop to think that he ought to have moved out of the way till the moment has passed.

Ben pauses to admire his work, stepping up to look at the fragmented splinters of the torn wood. But where the rings determining the age of this fallen giant should be, is a deep dark hole. Cold, stolid air rushes up to meet him as he looks down in to it, tinged with the rotten sweet smell of decay.

The hairs on the back of his neck rise up. Ben is suddenly very conscious that he is in the middle of the woods at night and has no idea how to get back to the car.

“Ben?”

Rey’s voice echoes up from the hole. Ben drops the axe and dives inside before he can think better of it.

 

 

 

“You can’t take her.”

“But I have to.”

“She is not yours to take.”

“She wasn’t _yours_ to take!”

“I didn’t take her, she was given to me. Now that I have her, I can hardly give her back.”

“But you could. She’s right there. Just-“

“You should leave this place, it isn’t for the living.”

“I might as well be dead without her.”

“You think I’ve never heard that line before? Pathetic.”

“Please! I’ll do anything. I’ll promise you…You can take…”

“You don’t even know what you have to bargain with, boy.”

“Then tell me!”

“You have nothing.”

“Not an option.”

Hades, terrible and dark on his throne of briers, smiles at Ben. “You know, I once knew a young man quite like you. Perhaps we can work out a deal.”

 

 

 

The journey down to the underworld had been instantaneous. The journey back is more complicated. Up ahead, Ben can see the circle of light coming from the open end of the tree trunk. He’s greeted by a sudden wave of regret that he cut down something that had been living so long. It could have had hundreds of years of life left, it might have looked out upon so many people’s lives if it hadn’t been cut down.

“Careful!” Rey warns, before Ben steps on a loose stone in the middle of the river they are wading up. The Stix is bitingly cold, he swears he’ll never feel his feet properly again.

Or he thinks it’s Rey. Something that had looked like her had been visible in the horizon of Hades' courtroom and he had bartered for it before bothering to check. He’s not allowed to look now, not until they’re above ground.

This could all turn out to be so pointless. He can see it now, him walking through life with a shade at his side, unable to fully engage with the waking world. What right did he have to pull her back with him? He never even asked if she wanted to leave.

She would have shouted at him, surely, if she hadn’t wanted to. She would have berated him for presuming to know what she wanted better than she did herself. A hand slips into Ben’s and he no longer knows if it feels the way she used to feel. Small and powerful, angry and beautiful. He doesn’t know anymore. He doesn’t know.

The lip of the tree trunk splinters under his boot. Ben looks down and sees the sap trickling back down to the underworld, growing cold and morphing into the river. His eyes follow it back into the dark, back the way he came.

“Ben!” The thing that may or may not be Rey shrieks, but its too late. Ben’s eyes find the black all over again, watching as time and space dissolve into nothingness.

He lands on his back, on the soft peat of the riverbank before Hades' palace. When he looks up, the light is gone and so is she. For the first time in months, he feels at peace.

 

 

 

She wakes in the morning to the sound of her alarm calling her to work, dressing quickly and eating a bagel standing up at the breakfast bar. The house is starting to feel less huge to her, more like something that she could fill all by herself. She doesn’t particularly like to, but she has to adapt. It’s been a year since she woke up on the forest floor, her shoes soaked through and the understanding that Ben was gone for good roaring loud in her ears.

Rey keeps his picture on the mantelpiece, on the windowsill in the kitchen. She keeps him on her nightstand in her bedroom. No one gets to come into this space without knowing that he once used to occupy it.

And some days its hard. But those days are getting fewer and fewer. Rey leaves the house each day with a packed lunch and an open mind. Sometimes she swears she can still hear him, laboured breathing and feet splashing through the river water as they made their way back towards the surface. But then the memory fades and for all she knows she dreamed it.


	5. Wounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey tries to understand the anatomy of injury

Rey doesn’t forget the soft clicking of Luke’s metal hand in a hurry, but it’s not till after the war is over that she has time to wonder what ever happened to the living flesh that used to occupy its space.

“Do you know?” She asks Ben through the bars of his cell.

Ben shrugs. He’s listless, still unsure what to do with himself now that his life’s work has been swallowed up by the Resistance and he’s still paying the price for his years of servitude. “He never told me.”

Rey reaches out with the Force to determine if he’s lying and decides that he’s playing ball tonight. She pulls her knees up under her chin as she watches him sitting on his bed, staring resolutely at the wall in front of him. “How do you think it happened?”

“He was in a fight. He over estimated his abilities or he underestimated his opponent. Or he made a mistake.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

Ben’s eyes flash towards her, dark and sad. Rey wishes she could articulate the change in him to everyone else, the deep seated desire, if not to do better, at least to understand what better would mean under his current circumstances. He blinks. “What happened when?”

Rey takes a finger and drags it down the right side of her face, from underneath her eye, down her neck and across her shoulder.

His face goes very tight, drawing his lips closed like he’s scared he’ll let something slip if he doesn’t.

For all the time she spent fighting in the war, mostly against Ben, Rey has yet to pick up a serious injury of her own. The worst she’s got is a three inch scar running down the back of her thigh where a rival junker had ambushed her in the belly of a Star Destroyer back on Jakku. That had been inexperience getting the better of her, she didn’t let it happen again.

Ben thinks about it for a long moment before letting his head fall back against the wall. “I was desperate.”

“Oh.”

“I made a mistake.”

“I see.” From where Rey’s sitting, it looks like Ben has made a whole lot of mistakes over his life. Not all of them are his fault, but he has to live with them all anyway. “What mistake?”

Ben frowns, radiating irritation. He finds her inability to read the mood of most conversations endlessly frustrating. “I mistook you for someone who could be turned.”

In the low lighting of the prison block, Ben’s scar is barely visible. Rey knows that in the bright light of day it mars his face with a thick red line that the doctors who saw him before he went to trial seem to think won’t ever really fade. A price he’ll have to keep paying for as long as he lives, along with all his other mistakes.

 


	6. Soulmates

The Falcon goes dark when the Resistance turns in to sleep. They’re taking it in turns on the beds, most people stowed away on the comfiest stretches of floor they can find. The ship is eerie like this, like it’s trying to build it’s own kind of night around them. Up ahead, the stars stretch out in a never ending ocean just ripe for the taking. They could go anywhere, they could hide away and never be seen again.

Rey waits up, curling herself into the chair that had once been Han’s and that she now had a wary ownership of. She’s ostensibly on guard duty, though she doesn’t see what there is to guard against. This quadrant is empty, and the First Order have bigger things to worry about than the location of this hapless band of rebels. She had accepted the post because she had wanted to be alone, more than anything.

She will never really be alone again. Rey picks at the fraying ends of the mental connection she shares with Kylo Ren and wishes she could work out how to sever it completely. If nothing else, it’s a liability.

The Force chose you, she thinks, it chose both of you.

“Traitor.” She mutters to herself. If she could, Rey would unchoose herself in an instant.

A wash of melancholy comes pouring in through the bond, and she’s nowhere near strong enough to stem the tide completely. She doesn’t have to see him, doesn’t even have to identify the specific intent behind his thoughts to know what he’s feeling. She’s no longer quite sure when it started, only that she hates it.

 _Give it a rest!_ She screams back at him, like he has any say in what she does with her mind when he’s not there.

He can’t hear her, but he’ll feel her anger rushing back at him. And perhaps he’ll sit and wonder, morose and inconsolable, whether she’ll ever open up that route again.

He doesn’t have to wonder. The Force chose the both of them, they’re in this for the long haul, like it or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In really dislike 99% of soulmates AUs and don't find the idea of soulmates particularly compelling except as people who choose each other so I kind of half assed this one


	7. Destiny

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren can't see the future, but he tries to all the same

He’s going to carry the scar as long as he lives. Kylo Ren stares down his reflection in the privacy of his quarters, running his fingers over the gash running from just below his right eye, down his collarbone and across his chest. He could kill Rey tomorrow and he’d still have this angry red line linking him back to her.

He could kill Rey tomorrow and it would bring him no closer to his absolution. But if she won’t join him he doesn’t see what choice he’s going to have.

Kylo Ren is the Jedi killer, Rey is the last Jedi. He lets his eyes glaze over and tries to picture her, wherever she is right now. She’s aboard the Falcon, tucked away in the cargo bay, perhaps trying to sleep. He doesn’t know if any of it is real or if he just wishes it were, but the picture calls to him, soothing his frazzled nerves.

The trouble is that every time his thoughts turn to her, he is filled with a sort of directionless certainty that feels powerful enough to build him to new heights or shatter him to pieces. The future isn’t well known to him, much as some Force users have the power to see into it, but what little he can glean feels like it doesn’t entirely belong to him. Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking, a weakness in character he will have to overcome.

Snoke would have made things easy for him, he would have told Kylo whether he was meant to kill the girl or save her and that would have been that. But without Snoke to guide him, Kylo struggles to find the courage behind his convictions.

Rey has something of that power though, to see that which will be, or that which might. She said she saw the shape of Ben Organa’s future, and then she fought by his side like they had been born to stand in that room together. It can’t have been more than five minutes between when Kylo cut clean through Snoke’s body and when Rey looked at him with the same disappointment that has been following him his entire life and said she would not join him, but in those minutes he had imagined that she would be his new guiding star in place of the mentor he lost.

She saw something, and then she saw that she was wrong. Kylo worries at the spot where the far tip of the scar bleeds back into smooth flesh and tries to persuade himself that he is confident to take on the mantle of Supreme Leader. He catches a glimpse of something that looks like his future, in which he is happy and Rey is with him, and for a moment he wonders if he might not live to see the end of this fight after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love! Come find me on [tumblr](http://jeffersonhairpie.tumblr.com/) and [twitter ](https://twitter.com/chadfuture_)


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